Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields (28 page)

I see the fourteen-year-old who is pregnant, the forty-year-old woman with six children, a shack, a baby in her arms, no food, no doctors, nothing but the cold in the night, and the men who come and go and leave the litter of young lives in their wake. And I must say it is their fault, they breed too often, they have careless ways, they should read more and improve their minds.

I have found the place where theories die, where explanations are stabbed with sharp knives and flutter down the
calles
like litter created by the world that will not come here and will not listen to ignorant cries of people busy dying and calling it fate or God’s will or the way things are and have long been and the only way they know.

The cars with tinted windows prowl the streets, the guns go off, the authorities hide, and death without end, amen.

The counting, I will get to later.

Yes, I will.

The man found incinerated in a car, that burned corpse with a sign saying he was a thief, well, I will get to him in a while and return to tabulating things. But in passing we should note that the remnants of a dragon tattoo still glow from his charred chest. Just as I will acknowledge that three or four hundred local cops had to be let go because they failed various tests, and it turns out they were actually criminals and drug addicts. But they have been replaced by yet more cops, and so life will continue in the approved fashion.

But now, right now, I need this red wine, I need her dark form leaning over the piano in the moonlight, I need the music flowing through my heart.

I imagine a city as a living organism with electricity, gasoline, and propane firing through its arteries along with heroin, alcohol, cocaine, and meth. The humans, the creatures such as myself, think we are the city, but we are merely servants of the organism, and we can be dispatched without any warning by bullets, and yet the city will continue because it functions for our pleasure and our safety. Where the energy we have unleashed plays out like a tidal wave and levels everything in its path, levels the army, levels the police, levels the cartels, levels the gangs, levels the woman walking home from work, levels the man careening out of the midnight saloon. The general and the thief face the same giant wave. One thinks power safeguards him from the wave, and one thinks the delirious visions of the drug shelters him from all storms, and all learn that something they never imagined has come to pass.

Once, their worst nightmare was that they were not in control.

Now, their real nightmare is that no one is in control.

There is an afternoon and six men are put against a wall and executed in broad daylight. There is a morning and three prison guards at the bus stop are machine-gunned on their way to work. There is the man burning in the car.

There is a midday when two men fall dead in a hail of bullets.

The moon streams in, the fingers fly, I become “Rhapsody in Blue,” and ignore the killing ground until the notes fade away.

The black boots came with Miss Sinaloa. She arrived that December afternoon with shiny black boots reaching almost to her knees, the heels thick, the surface acrylic as it threw light back up toward the heavens. The rest of her was skin, skin with bite marks all over her breasts, skin with handprints all over her ass. There were marks of beatings, also.

That was some weeks ago, when she had hair flowing down to her ass but had lost all of her wardrobe, save those boots. And lost her mind.

I sit here looking at a photograph taken in the yard of the crazy place. She has now been in her cage for some weeks, and her hair has been shorn. She is calming down and can be let out into the yard at times, a safe-conduct moment in which she struggles to rejoin the human race.

So she stands in the bright sunlight, boots gleaming, and she wears a satiny green dress and a black leather jacket. She holds a microphone in her right hand, and she is singing love songs. Behind her is the black amplifier and behind the equipment are her neighbors in the crazy place, and they look here and there and pay no attention to Miss Sinaloa singing of the heartaches that women must endure as they seek love in the world of men.

Her face is round and perfectly made up. Her cheeks shine, lips underscored with liner, eyebrows narrow and finely stated. Her body is solid and, to foreign eyes, might even look fat, but here in her native country, she looks good, a woman with some flesh, a woman a man can get a hold of as the night passes on sweat-soaked sheets. She is battered, she is still healing, she is half crazy, but it is clear to even my ignorant eyes that Miss Sinaloa is back, and men are simply creatures God created to worship her.

One member of her audience sits with head bowed and hands clasped between his knees. Another man wears a huge peaked hat such as the kind favored by Merlin in the ancient tales. A short man in a beige sport coat looks out with an idiot grin.

She sings because to fall silent is to die.

Even here, the world is about love or the world is about nothing at all.

I have learned many things from her, and because of this, I love her and her songs.

I think at times I need her music even more than she does.

Those red lips mean so much in a world of dust and blood.

They must pretend to have a monopoly on violence. So in the autumn of the killing season, six hundred military police and two hundred state and local cops converge on the prison that sits on the southern edge of Juárez. They come for their prey at 6 A.M. The prison is controlled by three local gangs: the Aztecas, the Mexicles, and the Artistas Asesinos—the Murder Artists. Some leaders are shipped away to another facility. There is a show of force until the veil drops again and the prison falls back into itself.

The entire raid is like a laboratory experiment that mirrors the city itself. The state parades as the real power. Inmates briefly cower and then return to violence and gangs and a world without a center. The newspapers note the assertion of order, then fall silent again as killing walks every pathway in the city.

It is a careless time.

Nothing you do can make you safe, and nothing you do can put you in danger. So, relax. You are in play, and all the neighborhoods are the wrong neighborhood, and all the bars are the wrong bar, and every minute of the day and night offers slaughter. This is not some breakdown of the social order. This is the new order. And we will adjust to it and it will be fine.

We are in a forever war, only it is not a war. It is not a crime wave. It just is. And we are. And this is it.

A kind of poetry falls out of the mouths of people as this new reality sinks in. The head of a local citizen’s group says,

We are living the consequences
of the war that has come to the city
and unfortunately
we are also realizing
that the presence of the
police
and the military
has not managed to lessen the number of
homicides at all.

The head of the local bar association says,

To what the people already know,
the fight against narco-trafficking
that has generated a war
between groups
and is a factor in the
incidence of criminality.
Another factor
is that we have not been able to have a structure
for
the efficient procurement of justice
demanded
by the size and quantity
of the crimes.

The state attorney general’s office offers,

For the Prosecutor’s office,
the most important thing
is to carry out
the greatest effort to lower these statistics.

I feel the dust blowing across Juárez, sip a beer, hear the humming of the gears in the murder factory, watch the police prowl and hunt. Serenity comes once you relax and accept the product. There is so much work to be done and so many willing hands. Those hundreds of gangs, also the gangs that wear police uniforms or military uniforms, the polished professionals of the fabled cartels, as well as volunteers from the bars and sad marriages—all are willing to help with the slaughter. And all of those failed gods line up like tired whores to give whatever support they can.

Black velvet, yes, that is the feel of the sky, the feeling of the darkness coming down as I spiral into the embrace of death on high heels wobbling through the bullet-shredded night. The lipstick bright red, the scent a bouquet snatched from a fresh grave.

Feel the rush of fresh air as people vanish, and space becomes available.

Take the present for granted.

And the night.

A long time ago, back when the world made sense to me and everything was appetite, I walked across the room at a party toward a woman with fine breasts and a “hello fella” smile and a singer floated out of the speakers saying, “Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’re tryin’ to be so quiet.”

A long time ago, I walked into a motel room covering my first murder and saw blood on the concrete block wall, a dull brown-colored stain against the gleam of the latex paint.

A long time ago, I broke into a neighbor’s house because she had not answered the phone or door for a day and I found her sprawled on the kitchen floor, eyes open and mouth with an expression of mild surprise.

A long time ago, I did not have to live in the future.

Nor did Miss Sinaloa.

I hold her hand, and, to be honest, neither of us pays much attention to the murders. We’ve lost count and ignore the details of the slayings.

The headline says that a commando re-kills a guy at the local Red Cross.

Around 8 P.M., a man arrives in a Montero jeep with Texas plates and a bullet hole in his thorax.

A few minutes later, three cars arrive, and two guys with rifles walk in, and as a doctor watches, they pump three rounds into the patient, two in the chest, one in the head.

Then they leave, and all three vehicles melt back into the traffic of the city.

For two hours, the Red Cross is out of commission, though the parents of the dead guy come by to see how he is doing.

Like I said, Miss Sinaloa and I have lost track of the killings and become lazy these days.

Round up the usual suspects.

What we have here is a failure to communicate.

There are a million stories in the naked city.

Death be not proud.

“You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes,” James 4:14.

True grit.

Suck in yer gut, we’re gonna whup it.

Don’t complain, don’t explain.

Are you feeling lucky, punk?

I have this desire to hear out a killer, to get down some torrent of speech on the work, a cascade of meanings and theories about killing people. I will be in a room sitting on a hard chair, notebook in hand, and the killer will start speaking and go on and on, and I will never write down a word, I will never hear a word. For a moment, I will be stunned by this dereliction of duty, and then a vast calm of indifference will descend, I’ll pour another drink, turn my back on the killer, watch a bird on a wire, think of a recipe I wish to cook, hum a favorite hymn as he prattles on and on trying to give meaning to a life he has emptied of meaning.

I have lost all appetite for explanations since they stalk truth and love and shove us all into a coffin of lies.

In the end, we are in the future. Or some of us are.

Miss Sinaloa moves closer, and I feel the warmth of her body.

Murder Artist

He always has time
for a little prayer. He was raised Catholic and he believes in God. So he makes it a rule to give them two minutes for a prayer. They are handcuffed, blindfolded, half-starved, and badly beaten. They are ready. And so they pray. And then, he strangles them, feels their bodies fight for air, struggle to retain some hold on life, and there is this ebbing, he can feel this in his hands, as they slide away into eternity.

He wants me to know this as we sit in the room, drapes pulled shut to keep out prying eyes, black coffee steaming in his hand, his voice level, and the sentences direct and with a simple eloquence. He is speaking for a trade, the
sicarios
, the professional killers, and he wants the world to know the work, and he wants the other
sicarios
out there to know that it is possible to leave the work. And come to God.

He has a green pen, a notebook. He has printouts from the Internet, mainly things about myself. He has spent ten hours researching me. Like so many pilgrims, he is in the market for a witness who can understand his life. He has decided I will suffice. He is at ease now. Before, his body language was hunched over, shoulders looming, hands ready, those trained and talented hands. He wore a skullcap that hid his hair, and he seldom smiled.

Now he is a different person, a man who laughs, his body almost fluid, his eyes no longer dead, black coals but beaming and dancing as he speaks.